New Antifeatures Article and FSF Members’ Bulletin

The FSF’s fall members bulletin is out. For it, I spent some time refining the blogpost I recently wrote on antifeatures into an article. I got a whole lot of feedback last time (Thanks!), most of which criticized my choice of examples. I’ve structured this version around different, and I hope less controversial, examples.

The bulletin also includes twopieces introducing a campaign against software patents that the FSF plans to launch early next year and a discussion of the AGPL by Brett Smith. This bulletin hints at what I think are the big issues that the FSF plans to take on next year: software patents, web services, and creative new takes on the free software message that are designed to resonant beyond our historically very technical community of hackers. I’ll write more on this in the next week or so. To support this mission, and to receive future copies of the bulletin directly, please consider becoming an associate member today during the FSF’s year-end members drive.

3 thoughts on “New Antifeatures Article and FSF Members’ Bulletin”

There’s a connection between antifeatures and the idea of price discrimination. If it costs you $2500 to write a program, and there are two users willing to pay $1000 each and 10 users willing to pay $100 each, there’s no one price that will work.

Mozilla does ship a version of Firefox that is funded by advertisements, and I’m using it right now. The advertisement comes in the form of the start page, which points to Google by default, and the search toolbar, that again points to Google by default. Google gives Mozilla a good chunk of money for this feature, as well as more money every time a Firefox user does a Google search.

Users aren’t inclined to take out this feature because they can already change the defaults easily if they prefer a different search engine, and Google provides a useful service.